Tabs be damned

Okay so I lied to you in the last post. I’ve been working on my first real Rails project for quite some time now, so instead of a realtime diary, I will be reflecting upon the major issues, that I went through (eg. “how to make a multiple-page wizard-like create controller”). The reason being, that I haven’t been allowed to speak in public about the project until now – we will release it in the coming week.

But I will break the cronology by starting with one of my latest issues:

Ruby on Rails does not allow tab characters for indentation in RHTML templates

Have you ever tried to get a wierd “SyntaxError Exception” when calling a page in your Rails application? There is nothing wrong with the inlined Ruby code.

It turns out, that if you indent your RHTML code with tab characters instead of spaces, the ActionViewer will report a compile error when evaluating your template.

I know, accept, and also appreciate, that Rails is “oppinionated” software. But this is really ridiculous. IMHO tabs are the only way to go – combined of course with spaces for alignment.